Calling Shenanigans On Super SATA's Claimed Audio Qualities 827
nk497 writes "Veteran Hi-Fi journalist Malcolm Steward has pushed newfangled Super SATA cables via his blog as a way to improve the sound quality of music, saying: 'My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the "air" around instruments.' If that doesn't sound right to you, you're not alone. As PC Pro blogger Sasha Muller argues: 'How on earth can a SATA cable delivering 0s and 1s to their respective destination have any effect on those 0s and 1s? The answer is, it can't. Unless it's a magical one made of pixie shoes.' So maybe don't invest in Super SATA cables unless you have proof they're magical first."
Ha ha ha! (Score:1, Interesting)
And all that low-level musical detail from an mp3!!!!!
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
And high-end digital cables are continued proof of this! I'm perfectly happy to pay $5 extra for a better cable so it won't actually break on me, or has a handy elbow bend in the connector, or whatnot (OK, maybe a bit more for a really long cable). Beyond that it's pure fraud.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
The California wine industry would be a shell of what it is now, if some enterprising brit didn't convince them to try a tasting without looking at the labels
Even after they tried to force him to supremeness the results...
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:2, Interesting)
optical has the advantage of isolation. IE both devices need not share a common ground. This is good as devices will have varying ground potential caused by transients such a digital switching which will ultimately cause noise in the signal when it's converted into analog. By using an optical interconnect you remove the noise source of the DVD player. So optical interconnects do have a point, although in practicality with good power supply and grounding scheme shouldn't be needed.
Maybe, just maybe (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They might work (Score:3, Interesting)
What's even funnier is if what he implies (but doesn't quite spell out) is he's got this:
HDD -> (SATA cable) -> NAS box -> (meters of bog-standard ethernet cables) -> Ethernet Switch -> (ethernet cables) -> Computer -> ???
Even *if* there was a measurable difference in a 1 ft SATA cable, 4 Ethernet interfaces ports, a pile of ethernet cable, and two CPUs after it would swamp any benefit.
Re:It's a scam... or stupidity (Score:3, Interesting)
But, it's worse than that.
Some of the people I've seen defending this stuff comes from audiophiles themselves. People who can recite the formulas related to the physics of speakers and audio-connections from memory. People who in theory could build a set of really good speakers and have likely built tube amps at some point.
People who claim to have "golden ears" which can identify the species of fly by the tone of their farts in a blind listening. Guys who swear up and down they can hear a slightly off-note from a 1954 recording on a direct-to-vinyl pressing and why that's important.
If it was only the guys at Best Buy or the people who fell for Monster Cable, I'd agree with you. But to hear someone who seemingly knows all about the technology -- well, that just baffles my brain.
It seems that some people truly believe this stuff. Though, as someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the placebo affect get stronger the more expensive the placebo. I'm not convinced that it's only people who don't understand the technology who fall for this -- at least they have an excuse of being duped and needing to defend their actions.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the wikipedia article you just linked to...
Indeed, the organizer of the competition, Steven Spurrier, said, "The results of a blind tasting cannot be predicted and will not even be reproduced the next day by the same panel tasting the same wines."[4] In one case it was reported that a "side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers."[5][6]
Not much good in blind tests if there is no repeatability.
Kinda like some tests of psychic powers out there, or homeopathy.
you surely mean jitter, not clock skew (Score:3, Interesting)
Cables cannot cause clock skew, because again long term the cable would have to somehow create or delete samples and a cable just can't do that. Cables can cause jitter, but the effect is vastly overstated.
Not reclocking data is a better way to deal with skew than reclocking is. Because if you reclock you have to drop samples or resample to deal with the long-term drift between the input clock and the reproduction clock.
Jitter on the input data can show up if you go straight to a DAC. But you can redesign your DAC to avoid it.
AES/EBU is a data format like S/PDIF. Either system can run over different forms of cable. AES/EBU is not an improved follow on to S/PDIF as you state. They were developed in parallel.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it works for him... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless the interference is happening after the D-A conversion...I have this issue with my desktop computer, which is why I switched to a USB headset, issue gone. Thos AC97 chips are terrible, I wish they would burn in hell and bring back discrete sound cards. I miss the decent sound cards you used to be able to get.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:4, Interesting)
Offopic here. To be fair, there are at least three definitions of Christians that I know of:
1. One who professes to believe in Jesus Christ as a savior figure
2. One who acts in a manner similar to who Jesus acted and lived, in his or her relationships with others.
3. One who belongs to a church or denomination that directly descends from the original, ancient Christian church, such as Catholics, protestants, etc.
I know of many folks of different denominations who fit into #1, but not #2 (we might call these hypocrites, but hey everyone is to a point). I know lots of people of all faiths and beliefs, even non-"Christian" who fit #2. Heck I know some atheists that fit #2. So if someone claims to be a Christian, I take them at their word, and hope they, above all, fit in #2, because everything else follows that.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.
Unfortunately, this isn't the whole picture.
Its pretty much certain that the data passed by the cable is identical. But its not certain that that the electromagnetic field created by pushing the signal through the cable is not interfering with a nearby analog component, introducing noise or hum. A better shielded digital cable might well actually make a noticeable impact.
For example, I used to work on a computer that where I could hear a low level buzz from the speakers when the hard drive was working. Maybe a shielded cable would have made a difference... or repositioning the hard drive relative to the other components. Or maybe it was grounding issue or something... I didn't investigate it; it wasn't my computer.
Re:Same for coax vs. optical ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ya know, I'm in the live entertainment biz and folks that have come from the computer world don't have near the ground problems as the stereo jockies. We just put everything behind two UPS with an autoswitcher in the middle and never looked back. Of course all of our stuff is HD-SDI so it either works or it doesn't. Grounds loops don't matter when you are digital as that interference won't mean anything to the decoder which wouldn't ever have the opportunity to receive said interference as the interface controller will do the signal passing at which point all grounding effects disappear. This was a huge issue when cameras had analog outputs with BNC connectors. Now that it's SD or HD-SDI none of us have ever looked back.
The only time I run into grounding effects these days is on the other side of distro where I'm outputting SD distro for large projectors. Everytime it's been because their cables were way longer than they needed to be so there wasn't enough signal to reach the other side. These days more often than not, hum bars are caused by lighting which can be adjusted for in most cameras.
Of course the audio is done separately and we put it back together for our recordings. Audio has been digital for a long time too. The only analog part is the microphone who's cable will attach to an amplifier usually only a few feet away. Noise is calibrated during the sound check so it gets filtered and has negligible impact on quality. The wireless microphones goes to their receiver which is almost always digital out as well. They all got sick of those grounding issues especially since most stage performances have to more or less share the same ground.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not getting the same exact results every time would mean that the test is very imprecise but not necessarily inaccurate. If the averages work out over many samples so that some wines are clearly favored where others are not, it would still be significant even if you don't get the exact same results with every test.
Later on in the same article it is stated that statisticians analyzed the results and found that the top two wines were the only ones that was statistically different in ranking from the other ones. Now granted, they had a pretty small sample size, but if you can't statistically differentiate quality with almost a dozen tasters I think you have some real problems.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, the cable isn't just changing the timbre of the notes; mellowing the harsh electronic edges, reducing noise levels, and other mumbo-jumbo these things are usually claimed to do. It is actually changing the timing of the music, in other words editing the music as it flies down the cable! If I put one of these on my hard drive I could expect to find fewer typos in my code.
Re:HA HA HA HA: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:HA HA HA HA: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that we can all agree that the 'magic' cables are going to pass the same 0s and 1s as any working cable. Still, it is not impossible that the 'magic' cables result in better sound. Allow me to play devil's advocate.
For example, non-magic cables might produce EM fields that may interfere with the audio equipment generating the sound that the blogged was listening to. The magic cables, with better shielding, might not, and thus, despite transporting the same 0s and 1s, result in better quality.
Of course, given the low voltage and current involved, I do not believe this for a second.
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Interesting)
The CD player reads the bits off the CD much like reading a CD-ROM, but there's a ton of CRC/ECC data. There's really no magic there at all. Most (all recent) CD players spin fast enough to oversample each region, in case of a bad CRC, but if the ECC works there's nothing left for the CD player to do at this stage.
There's a quality difference in DACs: a good DAC makes a difference, but it's subtle and with cheap speakers you wouldn't notice. The chips for a good DAC run about $10, plus a large heat sink, per channel and suck down a *lot* of power (10W each I think), so you won't find then in low-end or portable gear. My receiver with 7 of those DACs really heats up a room (I bought if for my bedroom and couldn't use it there). You'll routinely see those $10 chips sold in audiophile $1000 stand-alone DACs, which is amazing marketing (aka bullshit).
As far as cables, S/PDIF is quite robust, and the cable makes no difference at all unless it's physically damaged. I buy Dayton Audio cables from Parts-Express: for about $10 I can get a nice, solid cable of quality manufacture, similar to a $100 monster cable. But it makes no difference in sound quality, just ordinary physical quality.
Doubt it's SATA cable interference (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:HA HA HA HA: (Score:2, Interesting)
The only way I can imagine there being a difference is if you were to use SATA cables for carrying an analogue signal. I haven't RTFA, (since it seems to have been pulled or moved in order to avoid being slashdotted), but in this instance I expect the cable would suck royally, because there simply isn't enough copper there.
I would be the first to agree that snake-oil is available by the bucketful in the audio industry, but a reasonable expenditure on decent cables does make a significant difference to the output from a system held together with the lamp-cable interconnects that often come by default. The point is not to be sucked into the diminishing (or zero) returns scam of spending hundreds of dollars per cable.
Far more likely to be related to power and ground (Score:3, Interesting)
Hum can be caused by currents flowing in the cable grounds as well. Back in the good ol', we would make sure that the audio system components were grounded at one point (a 'star' earthing point) to avoid ground loops where audible signal currents could be induced. Not wishing to try to do the same with my PC and attached stuff, I isolate the PC from the amp by using a digital output (dirt cheap bit of old coax and a couple of phono connectors). Ta-da!
Re:A fool and his money... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I'm going to say "cab sav" many times in an internet post there is no way I'm going to type out "Cabernet Sauvignon" every time.
The purpose of the event was to have a theme for a party. You know a social event... with a dozenish girls and guys.
I cooked the meal: grilled mushrooms, brussel sprouts, and kobe beef. I also had 5 types of cheese (3 of them were really not liked-- 2 of them vanished).
Who cares about importance- we had a lot of laughter, I had an overly intimate goodnight hug with a girl I'm sweet on, and everyone who attended enjoyed themselves.
And we did all learn something about wine. The person who discovered he had a real taste for wine had gotten more into wine since then since he can really tell and likes the difference between a $20 and a $60 bottle of wine. Most of the rest of us learned that our taste buds stop at about $20. Any decent 91+ wine is going to be just fine for us (and some of those get down to $12).
Have not watched Sideways yet. My taste tends towards Inception, Expendables, Other Guys type of movies.
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The next tasting was 4 grades of scotch, $25 to $225. Again, everyone really enjoyed the chance to try and taste them side by side. While everyone agreed the $225 Blue was smoother, most liked the $35 McCallen (sp) best.
In October I'll be doing chicken and 5 types of chard's (hehe).
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Having a tasting is a really fun theme for a $400ish party and I recommend folks try it. And it gives everyone a reason to drink- even folks that don't normally-- but the quantities are limited so no one gets plastered. It's really cool.